On her previous album, Tasha was a rush of color in motion. The Chicago songwriter was fast approaching the end of a video game level and the inevitable change of map, power-ups, and co-players. She spoke then of her Saturn return—a stage of meteoric change you go through in your late twenties, when everything you know about yourself is reframed. She sang to old friends—sharing beach wine with Nina; eulogizing her late collaborator Eric Littmann—but also looked forward, asking the world: What’s next? She called the album All This and So Much More. She knew what was coming—her fourth full-length, You Are Spring!, arrives at the So Much More part.
First things first, Tasha left her native Chicago for an even bigger world—New York, where she’d been staying while portraying Nacna in Illinoise on Broadway. The opening track, an a cappella overture, bridges her two homes through its choice of guest vocalists: Brooklyn’s L’rain and Chicago bard Jamila Woods, the three voices distinct and controlled as they twirl around each other like a trio of synchronized swimmers gracefully moving through the water. There isn’t a note, word, or inhale out of place as they outline the record’s mission statement: “There’s life to be found now.”
A couple of years ago, Tasha wrote the bio for Woods’ Water Made Us album and has dabbled in music writing at outlets such as Bandcamp Daily and the Chicago Reader, profiling Black and Queer peers. Accordingly, she composes music like she understands every side of it—as a critic, appreciator, performer of other people’s stories, composer of her own. Put another way, You Are Spring! doesn’t emerge out of happy accidents or beneficial naivete. Not even a little. Tasha projects a sense of total control and confidence right from the opening track’s lyrical lucidity and expert choral writing.
This omniscience also goes for the way she approaches love these days—the topic she’s spent her music career trying to parse. “I’m older now, so I know how this goes,” she lilts of a faltering romance on “Lucky.” She goes for a walk in a forest and phones her mom, but reassures herself that “it was just the wrong time.” Her world is bigger now, and that means there’s less patience for superficial magic that dissolves like sugar on your tongue. She wants “moonlight and romance with meaning” on “Porous,” a velvety two-chord loop nudging her along.
This solidified certainty doesn’t mean anything is sterile or boringly neat. Tasha still has the music sound serendipitous: see the chirping soundscape of “Clarion,” as overlapping exclamations from pianos and synths float around her head in a serene swirl. The percussive floor of “Actor” sounds like it was compiled from sampled city-street sounds: trucks being unloaded, grates hissing hot air, and sirens protesting several blocks away. “The city in summer is hungry and hot and alive” on the waltzing “Promise,” and the clarinet confirms it as though snaking out of an apartment window into yours during a sticky, wide-awake evening.
Love can still feel that way for her, too—free and exciting and unplanned. “Stay awake just long enough to make sure the day’s done / Kissing outside of the subway reminds me I’m young,” she sings during “Promise”’s opening bars, spoiling us with relatable couplets that are simple but totally perfect. The difference now, compared to previous albums, is that she knows what comes next and can take it as it comes. Dating with intention; writing with intention.
Tasha has never lacked cohesion, but she’s also never made an album that feels as clear and conceptual as this, the ideas fully worked through and shaved down to perfect size. Her other records were Totally Tasha, but they also took detours that suggested a “see what sticks” approach. Occasionally, these produced her best songs: “Burton Island” was a lakeside field-recording reflection that departed from the joyous brass of “Perfect Wife,” for example. Likewise, All This and So Much More was led by a punchy but anomalous indie rock single “Michigan,” though nothing within the body of the record quite aligned with its oomph.
While I do miss Tasha’s interludes and scrappiness, You Are Spring! undoubtedly sounds like it was made by a pro who knows what she wants. You can hear that in the big-swing theatrics ostensibly informed by her time performing Illinoise. Besides the opening overture, there are cinematic motifs that evolve as they’re passed between instruments (see the tiptoeing, Pixar-esque piano melodies that lift up “Perfect” and “Summer”). There’s also the Gershwinian noir of the woodwind orchestration on “Special,” and the way she connects the opening track’s “don’t die now” command with the finale’s “do you remember you’re alive?”
You could argue that this virtuosity means part of what defined Tasha’s voice early on— the playful, unpolished part—is lost, and I’ll admit that I don’t need a piano ballad such as “Ending” from her when I know she’s got songs like “Love’s Changing” and “Year From Now” in the bank. Still, there’s enough intimacy, even on this bigger scale, to keep us involved. The final track, “Quick!,” is almost a failsafe in that regard. It’s an outlier, a crackling acoustic guitar plodding through two inverted, clustered chords. It could be a phone demo or a live recording, lo-fi and play-it-as-it-lays. But that tracks with the subject matter, as she remembers her childhood, her mother singing, playing with her brother. It has to sound fuzzy and imprecise, like any memory or home movie.
Lyrically, “Quick!” lands on a similar point to another Chicago legend, Ferris Bueller: life moves fast, beauty rushes by, you should stop and enjoy it. She goes on to converse with her child self: the “little girl asleep / tell me what you dream / I’m a mockingbird / repeating all I’ve heard / I’m a falling star / landing where you are.” The lyrics are poetry, and blown-out drums fall away to give them space, spotlighting her double-tracked voice and a softer, prettier acoustic that sounds like it’s already told thousands of stories. It is also double-tracked—and that won’t be a coincidence. These days, the most enduring duet is with herself.
Maybe it goes without saying, but the recipient of the album title—You Are Spring!—is Tasha, saving her loveliest compliment for herself and every version she’s been. If you can’t see spring and its connotations—beauty, hope, life—in the mirror, if you can’t count on that, build art from that, then you’ve got to keep moving until you reach the so much more. As Tasha demonstrates on You Are Spring!, you just need to let yourself get there in your own time. [Bayonet]
Hayden Merrick is a music journalist based in London, and Senior Features Editor at The Line of Best Fit. He also writes for Bandcamp Daily, FLOOD, and other publications.
